Rambling, rumbling, rumination

One Wizard’s Treasure

I’ve had a little more time than I thought over the holiday weekend, since the book illustration is on hold for revision, and I had a few hours to actually go play something. I know, I said I’d be out of commission for a while, and I will be soonish, but I wanted to slip this in while it was on my mind and while I had a few minutes to write. It’s how I polish my thoughts, for better or worse.

I popped back into Wizard 101 recently to see what recent changes have done to the game. In short, I like Grizzleheim’s design, housing is pretty cool, and the Bazaar is nice, but I really don’t like No Trade/No Auction items, I’m very sad that I can’t get the old crown gear, crafting is an unholy grind, and gimmick fights are unfortunate.

The Friendly Necromancer wrote to King’s Isle about the No Trade flag (a while ago, I’m catching up, remember?), and received a response, chronicled here:

“Making certain items restricted to one character makes them more rare and valuable. The number of items in the game that are restricted is a tiny percentage of items. We are constantly assessing which items to mark as No Trade and are listening to the community feedback on this and other matters.”

I strongly disagree. Items restricted to a single character have a higher chance of being almost completely worthless as anything but vendor trash. My Balance Wizard scored a spiffy healing ring from an instance boss in Marleybone, but he couldn’t use it because he isn’t a Life Wizard. It was marked No Trade/No Auction. I couldn’t even break it down into crafting ingredients like I could with a WoW Bind on Pickup item that I couldn’t equip. What should be a very valuable ring was vendor trash to me.

To add insult to injury, it was “appraised” for 3500 gold or so at the Bazaar, but I wasn’t allowed to put it up for sale. Since Bazaar buy prices are very low compared to sale prices, I was holding a ring that would have sold at the Bazaar for well over 30,000 gold. I couldn’t even give it to an alt on my account. I had to sell it to a vendor for a whopping 355 gold.

This isn’t working. I got a useless item, was taunted with how much it could have been worth, and it didn’t even function as a gold sink as most other Bazaar-resale items do.

That’s not “rare and valuable” in my book, that’s annoying, wasteful, and ill-conceived.

As for the now-unavailable crown gear, I’m rather disappointed. One of the early draws of the game was that you could get gear with crowns (W101’s secondary microtransaction currency) that offered unique bonuses and extra cards for your deck, expanding combat options. A short while after release, you could also get that gear with in-game gold (though it was very expensive). I thought this to be the best of both worlds; you could pay cash and get the gear, or pay with time and get the gear via grinding gold. Now, the “crown gear” has changed, and is severely underwhelming (weaker stats and no extra card), and it’s not available for gold purchase any more.

I’m baffled by this decision on King’s Isle’s part, and I consider it to be extremely ill-conceived as well. One of their brilliant ideas, and a sterling example of “RMT” done right (pay with cash or time for the same stuff), is gone. That doesn’t bode especially well in my book, either for W101 in particular or the genre at large.

The gimmick fights, as noted by Tipa over here (Cyrus Apologizes), are another strange decision. I’m very sympathetic to the notion of introducing a bit more variety than simple “smash and grab” encounters by introducing “puzzle” aspects of boss encounters. It’s nice to have different ways to play the game. Except… these weren’t presented as an option, they were a sudden and complete change. What would have worked better is to offer both styles, and let players choose what they wanted to do. You can’t always do that when you change a game, but this one would have been a very natural fit for “Heroic” dungeon options in the game.

Crafting is a nice addition in theory, but the mechanics of crafting in W101 aren’t all that impressive. It’s a significant grind to get all of the materials to craft items, and most crafted items just aren’t all that useful, especially as an older character going back and grinding up through the ranks. Vertical progression in crafting is just as annoying as it is in character development.

The game is still very good, and a great bit of fun. I could just be oversensitive to change, as I’ve suggested others are in the past. I’m certainly not boycotting the game or suggesting that anyone else should either. It’s just that these decisions make little sense to me. They aren’t like Blizzard’s Faction Switch fiasco, which can be handwaved away as a way to let players get together easier while earning a bit of revenue from those willing to pay the fee. These are just pure game design decisions in W101… and they don’t make sense. Even the stated rationale isn’t well reasoned. It’s a bit disheartening seeing devs that I’ve held up as being great examples make dumb decisions like this… it makes me wonder if earlier successes were just lucky.

When changes in these MMO things happen, they need to happen for good reasons, and the notion of “bait and switch” needs to be carefully avoided. Changes should bring about more choices and things to do, not fewer. As I’ve written elsewhere, change is inherent in the MMO genre, and it’s only fair that I find myself on the bad end of some changes when I applaud changes in other games. Karma and all that…

Even so, stepping back and trying to see what they are doing with W101, I see some odd choices and some ideas that really needed to be thought out a bit more, and then changed before implementation. It’s something to learn from, at any rate. I’m glad that I’m not invested in the game to the tune of hundreds of dollars and several months of hardcore playtime. The disappointment would be more personal, rather than abstract.

So yes, Spinks, I understand the notions of “betrayal” that invested players get when things change. That’s a personal itch that makes sense. I just see things like the WoW Faction Switch as a smart decision overall, and can ignore the personal annoyment borne of attachment, investment and a sense of entitlement. I just can’t find a good game design or business reason for these W101 changes, so it’s annoying personally, which I’m already over, and professionally, which is a bit more unnerving. Strange that my priorities are thus, perhaps, but so it goes.

Edited to add: Beej’s comment below reminded me of something. I still heartily recommend Wizard 101 to play, especially if you’re just going to try out the free zones and get a feel for it. It’s a lot of fun to play. These concerns I have are about itemization, crafting and the economy. They aren’t insignificant complaints, but they don’t have a significant impact on how you actually go about playing the game from day to day. The core card-game combat is brilliant, and the setting and story are delightfully whimsical. It’s still a fun game to play, despite concerns, and that makes it an easy one to recommend.

“Bind on Equip” or “Bind on Pickup” come to mind. Infinitely superior to this system, while retaining the notion to make these items rare and special.

I personally favor a “Bind on Equip” system. It removes stuff from the game economy and keeps it rare, while it still allows trade.

Otherwise, just forget about it and let people trade with whatever they want.

Looking forward to bang my head against the wall the day a warrior finds the ultrarare “ultimate wizard staff who contains the secret of immortality” (requires 1000 wizardry skill) and cannot even salvage or sell it to the merchant, but has to destroy the “useless item”. 😛

Pete, I should clarify: They still have crown gear, but this “season” of the stuff is very nerfed compared to the older stuff, and you can’t get it with gold any more. I suspect the nerf is due to PvP concerns, but when the gear is available to anyone via crowns or gold, the system is plenty balanced.

They are revisiting the puzzle boss encounters, so they do listen to people, which is a good sign. I haven’t seen much discussion about the crown/gold gear, though… maybe I should start a fuss on their forums. People miss the old gear, but they aren’t fussing about losing access to crown gear via gold.

Aye, Longasc, Bind on Equip would work here. (Bind on Pickup would have the same problems, since you can’t see something and *not* pick it up.) Alternatively, all No Trade/No Auction items should be useful for all Wizards. It’s the school-specific stuff that’s really useless as anything but vendor trash. Since there are seven schools, anything school-specific has a high chance of being useless. Add to that the newer gear that is specific to a primary/secondary school combo, and things are even more likely to be useless. (My Wizard is Balance/Death, so a Balance/Storm bit of gear would be suboptimal, especially since half of the gear’s “power” is consumed by bonuses that mean nothing to me.)

They could also alter the loot tables to drop gear for specific wizards, I guess. My Balance Wizard would never see Life-specific gear, in other words; if a Life ring were to drop, the loot table would override it and give me a Balance ring of equivalent value. I’m not sure which approach would be more work at this point, but that there are at least three viable solutions suggests to me that it’s not an unsolvable problem.

I’ve been seeing so much Wizard 101 stuff lately that I’m tempted to give it a go, even after reading these complaints. The way I see it is that any game worth having complaints about is worth a few unsung praises as well. I just don’t want to go into paying for something else. Is the free area worthwhile?

Beej, I still heartily recommend the game, and I’m enjoying playing it. I’m a bit baffled by what I see as bad decisions, but those are tangential to the actual act of playing. W101 is a blast to play.

The free area is definitely worth checking out. You’ll get a good read on combat and your school’s play style. The multi-foe combat is minimal in the free areas, but it’s significant afterwards… that and other cards to play with (and new things to see) are the biggest things you’ll miss out on by not going past the free zones.

Great article! I’ve long been an advocate for the end of “bind on pick up.” To me it really destroys the classic dungeon crawl feel and frustrates players. Why shouldn’t I be able to trade or sell an item?

The most common answer is, “we want to be sure that the player who uses an item earned it.” That isn’t really a positive enough answer to out weigh all of the negatives. At any rate, I won’t go on one of my long rants about it! There are plenty of them out there already.

“Earning” something in these games is so fuzzy anyway. Is the time spent accumulating gold with which to buy an item not “earning” anything? (This applies to the ability to buy Crown gear with gold as well, incidentally.)

Does earning gold require skill? Gevlon seems to think so, and he’s probably right, inasmuch as it can be earned at different rates, and finding the quickest rates requires more than mindlessly grinding mobs.

When arguments come down to “I want others to do it my way”, I feel free to ignore them.